[Marxism] Washington Post editorial: Voting rights for ex-felons

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The Post, which was VERY enthusiastic about the administration's war
policy until it became basically undeniable that the administration was
running aground in Iraq (they still hope to save the war as a whole but
not the current management), and on the economy, has now endorsed Kerry.

Their endorsement of this basic democratic right -- which should
actually be extended to ALL prisoners, and is even now being
unconstitutionally denied to "suspects" held in prison without being
convicted (who should be given absentee ballots as a matter of course)
-- is thus a fringe benefit of the growing tendency of the current
administration to sink below the horizon.

The editorial also adds, no doubt intentionally, to the mounting
pressure on the administration to back off from last-ditch attempts to
hold on to office by attacks on the Black vote, including using
challenges to effectively shut down voting in Black or other precincts
regarded as hostile.
Fred Feldman

washingtonpost.com
Editorial
Voting Rights for Ex-Felons
Wednesday, October 27, 2004; Page A24


YOU MIGHT NOT expect that Virginia Gov. Mark R. Warner (D) would have
attracted controversy with his modest efforts to restore voting rights
to ex-felons. More than 200,000 former offenders are disenfranchised in
the commonwealth, where ex-felons are barred from voting for life unless
the governor intervenes. Mr. Warner has restored the right to vote of
only about 1,900 of them. Yet that has been enough for some Republicans
in the General Assembly to cry foul. Last week Del. Bradley P. Marrs
(R-Richmond) wrote a letter complaining that he was "very disturbed to
learn of the breakneck pace" at which the governor is granting petitions
and warned the governor not to make restoration automatic. "I believe
the General Assembly would look askance at any efforts to bypass its
policy-making authority on this point," he wrote.

Mr. Warner is not restoring voting rights as a matter of course once a
convict has served his sentence; we wish he were. The governor deserves
credit for taking his responsibility to consider these applications more
seriously than his predecessors did. He has granted considerably more
petitions than any other recent governor. He has also streamlined the
process by which ex-felons can file those petitions, and he has moved to
clear a disgraceful backlog that his predecessors allowed to build up.
But the process remains, under Virginia's constitution, a matter of
gubernatorial grace -- not a policy of restoring the vote to ex-felons
as a routine part of welcoming them back into society. The real problem,
in other words, is precisely the opposite of the one about which Mr.
Marrs complains.

Virginia is one of seven states that permanently disenfranchise
ex-felons; the others are Alabama, Florida, Iowa, Kentucky, Mississippi
and Nebraska. Seven other states, including Maryland, have less
far-reaching restrictions. The result, according to the Sentencing
Project, a nonprofit organization that promotes alternatives to
incarceration, is that about 1.7 million people nationally are denied
the vote despite having paid their debts to society. Minorities are
disproportionately represented. This is wrong, and it's bad policy to
boot. Reintegrating former criminals into society is a hard task under
the best of circumstances. It is all the harder when the stigma of a
conviction lingers forever, undermining a person's citizenship and
pushing him away from the community into which he is supposed to be
reintegrating.

With Americans preparing to elect a president, it is worth considering
the message states send to those whom they exclude from this central
event of democratic life: You are still and forever outside of the
polity. It's exactly the wrong message, and it needs to change, in
Virginia and elsewhere.
C 2004 The Washington Post Company


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